The Unquiet Pedagogy of Harold Pinter’s Mountain Language : Topical Lessons from India

Abstract: In teaching Harold Pinter’s Mountain Language , I have observed how Indian postgraduate students see for themselves the institutionally sponsored biases and the hierarchized linguistic-racist ideologies these biases spawn. Political questions occur naturally to them: Why even democratic regimes should fear language itself? Why they feel driven to deploy a state language as a weapon in their war games? If English silences dissidence and considers BIPOC narratives devious and defiant, then Pinter would ask us to think differently about English and its potential linguicidal threat. The politics of interdiction that besets communities is another topic that students engage with in reading Pinter. This Note concludes with a reflection on the impossible task of translating Mountain Language for the simple reason that it stages English as at once its theatre and topic. Brought into dialogue with this conundrum is Brian Friel’s Translations , a play that stages another cultural scenario where English bespeaks colonial violence without quite letting an audience see the dubious logic of endorsing that violence.